‘Live your best life’ can be triggering
The phrase “live your best life” is highly triggering for me. I think a local religious group claimed it as their own, and even though their intentions were good (maybe), the connotation was that to live your best life, you had to be part of their church. Someone I knew said it a lot, too. Whenever I asked them how things were going, they replied: “I’m living my best life.” It came across ingenuine, and it got under my skin.
So many people and marketers and companies and products and institutions tell you that if you follow, join, buy, have, you too could live your best life.
No thanks. It just sounds like someone trying to sell something, and I’m not buying...
But lately, this phrase has been redeemed for me, in a different way.
Our Jewish mothers and fathers didn’t believe in the concept of heaven that we have been taught (which mind you, is a fairly new idea - that heaven is a place we go when we die if we’ve pleased God). For them (and for Jesus and his crew), heaven was the idea of the Shalom (peace) of God inhabiting the here and now. That’s why they feasted and participated in the festivals - not to remember something that happened, but to embody the “happening” that happened back then in their "here-and-now-in-this-day" life. Connecting, participating, joining in - living the Kingdom of Heaven into reality.
'Live your best life' often comes across as toxic positivity, but lets flip that. What if we made it about owning the moment. ‘I’m going to live - give myself, open my eyes, breathe deep, awake, aware, alive - this moment all the way through.' Gratitude and grace.
Now listen, lets go deeper - that doesn’t mean that every moment needs to be dripping in meaning and seriousness. If the moment calls for laughter, throw your head back and howl. If the moment is grief-stricken, do not be ashamed of your broken heart, and let the tears flow. If the moment calls for rest, then my friend, give yourself to the nothingness of inactivity like your life depended on it, because, in fact, it does. If the moment is an invitation for pleasure, partake with joy and abandon and passion and fun. Do not let these moments pass you buy. If the moment calls for stillness, for silliness, for silence, or for savouring, then lean in, drink long, give yourself to it.
Living your best life isn’t a highlight reel of thrills and bliss, it doesn’t hinge on achievements and successes, it isn’t validated by gatekeepers and the famous. It's about bringing your true self to the world around you. Its opening your eyes to witness the wonders and horrors that both seem to overwhelm us at different times, and often at the same time. It’s about allowing the contradictory multitude of experiences that make up our life in this world live all at once, together. It's accepting the grace and gifting it back all in the one breath.
Jesus best life looked like wandering the desert for 40 days; turning water into wine; escaping to the hills to pray alone; preaching in the temple; teaching on hillsides; healing lepers; accepting Samaritans; challenging the status quo; feeding five thousand people at once; telling subversive and confusing stories; disrupting the dominant paradigm; having dinner with his friends; raising his bestie back to life (great perk BTW); pissing off the powers that be; demanding justice when others demanding conformity; and it looked like allowing himself to be killed by empire and religion to show us what power looks like when its rotted with fear and greed.
It looked like rising from death to life, because that’s what happens when you die to ego and allow your true self to rise from the ashes, from the personal to the global.
Own your moment. Live your best life. Because what else are you going to do? What could be more powerful?
HEAVEN IS HERE: Heaven is not out there somewhere waiting for you to arrive when you die if you've been good. Heaven is within you, and it embeds itself further into you and the world around you as you die to your ego and let your true self rise, over and over again.
From the upcoming series, "Everyday Sacredness" this week, with a subscription, in the App.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
